The honesty of Knausgaard and the price he paid for it

As we near the end of Book Six of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, the inevitable takes hold of the narrative. As noted previously, this volume gives us the odd perspective of a novel eating its own tale (tail?): Book Six is in large part about the reaction to and fallout from the publication, some five or so years back, of the first 2 volumes of this work. Se we see KOK in his domestic life, composing Book 6 and reflecting on the earlier volumes. The main narrative tension - at first - involves the efforts of his Uncle Gunnar to suppress publication; these efforts failed in the broad sense but succeeded in another way, forcing KOK to be highly sensitive to personal information he reveals about others. So he criticizes some of the subsequent volumes, which are painfully revealing regarding many personal aspects of KOK's life, including his sex life, but which he decries as a failure because they are not entirely true to the facts of his life. Near the end of Book Six, the "struggle" comes closer to home. There are many scenes of his rather boring domestic life, involving a lot of child care and schedule coordination w/ his wife, Linda. Hanging over KOK's head throughout, as he composes Book 6, is how Linda will react when she reads the drafts of the as yet unpublished book 2, which largely concerns the early years of their relationship. Ad the inevitable happens: She pretty much freaks out when she reads this volume, and from this opening we learn that their marriage is not so pacific as the earlier pp led us to believe. KOK spews forth his animosity toward Linda and his doubts about their marriage, and she comes back at him (I don't have sequence of events down just right) when read his account of his infidelity in the Book 2 manuscript. On top of this, we are reminded that she has a history of bipolar disorder, for which she has been hospitalized - so we really see how shaky this marriage is and we recognize, with sorrow and pity, that KOK's own commitment to complete honesty is the force that is dividing them. In other words, he won the battle with Gunnar, but he lost the war, so to speak. We see first hand and almost "live" - writer commenting on his ongoing writing - the cost writers often pay (cunning, exile, and terror) for their revelations, with KOK being an extreme case.